Show Report, Day One

Back in May,
Craig
Mundie, Microsoft's Senior VP Advanced Strategies, made a
very strategic move; he gave a
speech
at NYU's Stern School of Business that announced the terms by which
Microsoft was cracking open—barely—its source code. He called the
company's new licensing model
“shared
source”. (I just wrote “scared source” by mistake, which
tells you where my mind is headed.)

The fact that Microsoft would start rapping about
any kind of source code, and modify it with a
fresh new euphemism—shared—caused immediate
tissue rejection in the hacker cultural body. Leading hackers so
certain of their own Truth that they refuse to appear on each
other's t-shirts were suddenly gathered around their collective
keyboards to craft a single response that would say, in polite
terms, “Embrace and extend this, dude.”

We urge Microsoft to go the rest of the way in embracing the
Open Source software development paradigm. Stop asking for one-way
sharing, and accept the responsibility to share and share alike
that comes with the benefits of Open Source. Acknowledge that it is
compatible with business.

Free Software is a great way to build a common foundation of
software that encourages innovation and fair competition.
Microsoft, it's time for you to join us.

Mundie came back with a
piece
in CNET that framed his argument in terms of economics,
manufacture and the PC's popularity:

... this is more than just an academic debate. The commercial
software industry is a significant driver of our global economy. It
employs 1.35 million people and produces $175 billion in worldwide
revenues annually (sources: BSA, IDC).

The business model for commercial software has a proven track
record and is a key engine of economic growth for many countries.
It has boosted productivity and efficiency in almost every sector
of the economy, as businesses and individuals have enjoyed the
wealth of tools, information and other activities made possible in
the PC era.

In my speech, I did not question the right of the open-source
software model to compete in the marketplace. The issue at hand is
choice; companies and individuals should be able to choose either
model, and we support this right. I did call out what I believe is
a real problem in the licensing model that many open-source
software products employ: the General Public License.

The GPL turns our existing concepts of intellectual property
rights on their heads. Some of the tension I see between the GPL
and strong business models is by design, and some of it is caused
simply because there remains a high level of legal uncertainty
around the GPL—uncertainty that translates into business
risk.

In my opinion, the GPL is intended to build a strong software
community at the expense of a strong commercial software business
model. That's why Linus Torvalds said last week that “Linux is
never really going to be a rich sell.”

This isn't to say that some companies won't find a business
plan that can make money releasing products under the GPL. We have
yet to see such companies emerge, but perhaps some will.

He added,

What is at issue with the GPL? In a nutshell, it debases the
currency of the ideas and labor that transform great ideas into
great products.

It would be easy to dismiss all this as provocation in the
voice of boilerplate, or worse, “a declaration of war on our
culture”, as one überhacker privately called it. But neither
of those responses are useful to folks caught in the middle—the IT
professionals my Linux Journalcolumn
calls “suits”.

As it happened Eric
Raymond and I were both guests on the May 14 broadcast of
“The Linux Show”.
When conversation came around to the reasoning behind open-source
rhetoric, Eric said this:

We used the term open source not to piss off the FSF folks,
but to claim a semantic space where we could talk about issues
without scaring away the people whose beliefs we wanted to
change.

So far this has been an
extremely
successful strategy for which Eric and the
Open Source
community deserve extreme credit. Even if IT suits don't
agree about what “open source” means, they're all at least talking
about it. And using lots of it, too.

But if markets are conversations, everybody who inhabits the
open-source semantic space is involved in the market—a market that
now includes Microsoft. What happens if Microsoft makes more sense
to their constituency than we do? This is an important question.
Conversing is not the same as believing. Remember Eric's last seven
words from above. Most of the suits talking about open source are
still people whose beliefs we want to
change.

Changing other people's beliefs isn't like changing your
shoes: it's like changing other people's
shoes. Even if the other guy's shoes are ugly and uncomfortable,
they're still familiar to him. And in this case, familiar doesn't
cover it. In the IT world, Microsoft's platforms, software and
tools are the prevailing environment that Microsoft wants very much
to protect.

How much? Here's Steve Ballmer
talking
about Linux in January: “I think you have to rate competitors that
threaten your core higher than you rate competitors where you're
trying to take from them.” He adds: “It puts the Linux phenomenon
and the Unix phenomenon at the top of the list. I'd put the Linux
phenomenon really as threat No. 1.” He goes on to say
Sun and
Oracle are “second tier”
rivals, adding, “I'd put AOL probably maybe at that level or a
half-step down.”

So how well does Steve Ballmer understand this threat? Not
very, judging from
this
this wild conflation of open source, Linux and licensing:

The only thing we have a problem with is when the government
funds open-source work. Government funding should be for work that
is available to everybody. Open source is not available to
commercial companies. The way the license is written, if you use
any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your
software open source. If the government wants to put something in
the public domain, it should. Linux is not in the public domain.
Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property
sense to everything it touches. That's the way that the license
works.

Never one to shy from a fight, Eric Raymond blasted back a
Q&A titled The Big
Lie:

Other open-source licenses—such as the BSD license in the
TCP/IP stack that Microsoft adapted for Windows—will never
infect anybody's code or data, because they're designed not to. But
Ballmer wants business people and the public to fear them all,
because only if open source is general is discredited will
Microsoft maintain its monopoly.

The Big Lie is a term originally coined to describe a
characteristic form of Nazi (and later Soviet) propaganda. The
essence of the Big Lie propaganda technique is that if you repeat
the lie often enough over enough channels, people will soak it up
through their pores and come to believe it as something “everybody
knows”.

In the last three months, Jim Allchin and Craig Mundie and
Steve Ballmer have launched a classic Big Lie campaign against open
source. They have described it as “un-American”, “a destroyer”, and
“a cancer”. They have deliberately confused the GPL with
non-infectious open-source licenses, and they have deliberately
confused active combination of code with passive aggregation of
data. They have lied, and lied, and lied again.

Why? Because the most truthful thing Ballmer admitted in that
interview is that yeah, Linux *is* a threat to Microsoft.

There's a good reason Microsoft can get away with a
lie & confuse strategy: its #1 threat is
pretty damn confusing already, without any help from Microsoft.
Most confusing of all, from the perspective of common business
sense, is the GPL, about which the Open Source community is both
respectful and protective, even though there is plenty of
disagreement about it. By hitting the GPL squarely where it appears
least useful for business, Mundie disperses the community like a
rack of pool balls. Suddenly they're all over the place, talking
about all kinds of stuff.

To see what I'm talking bout, check out this diagram from the
Free Software Foundation's
philosophy
page: fsf

From the perspective of both Microsoft and its customers, the
one thing that's easy to understand (not right or wrong, just easy)
is in the upper right. This is the familiar stuff that IT suits
have been paying for since the Nixon administration. By aiming
insults at the GPL in the lower left, Microsoft hopes everybody in
the Free/Open communities will rush to defend what business folks
have the most trouble understanding: the FSF's belief that software
should not be
owned.

In other words, Microsoft wants us to join a “debate” in
which we defend the one thing we can't stop arguing about amongst
ourselves. What's more, they've located their position—shared
source—in a location toward which the business end of the open
source world is headed anyway.

That's right. “Everybody's headed toward a hybrid model”,
Larry Augustin told me last week. He didn't have time to explain
exactly what he meant, but last night at dinner Eric Raymond gave
me an explanation that included this interesting fact: VA will sell
some closed-source software. He hedged with some pretty big
qualifiers, but the word “closed” passed his lips.

A few days ago I asked another CEO what's going on. He said,
“Call it `shared source,' `gated source' `source under glass'...
we're all working in the same direction.” When I pressed him for a
reason, he said, “We need to make money.”

Nobody in the commercial end of the Open Source community is
eager to speak in vivid terms about the drift in their commercial
source code policies—at least not yet. Meanwhile, Microsoft is
very eager to do exactly that, giving them a certain
advantage.

Will
Craig
Mundie will use that advantage on Thursday when he
debates
Red Hat CTO
Michael
Tiemann? Will open-source luminaries (a superset of the
Beowulf Cluster who signed the original response to Mundie) take up
the issue when I raise it with them at the Open Source Summit
tomorrow? And will the open-source conversation grow to include
independent commercial developers like
Dave Winer and his
company, Userland,
which are doing open-source work (in Userland's case, on
XML-RPC
and SOAP) but have not
been members of the community until now?

Finding out more about this stuff is Job One in San Diego
this week. Stay tuned.

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